January 24, 2002

Plains Folk: Lone Wolf

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

The approach is unprepossessing. A wooden sign pointing off the Ice Plant Road south of Hobart, Okla., directs visitors up a dirt lane to the Elm Creek Kiowa Tribal Burial Grounds. Remains of cotton bolls bob in the wind; calves graze wheat pasture. As we enter the graveyard, dozens of turtle doves spirit up from fresh graves marked with red soil.

Few trees adorn (or mar) this burial ground. There are some red cedars, fronds of which were employed in the Kiowa sun dance, dried needles of which have been burned as incense in peyote ritual.

Splashes of color surround certain graves–plastic flowers, spinning pinwheels, toys and mementos. In contrast another plot is surrounded with a wrought iron fence. Reading the gravestone of George Topping, 1851-1917, I consider the irony of that enclosure. This was a man who ran buffalo and dropped them with arrows bearing tooth marks.

The Kiowa are a plains people with a grand history, one that white readers of recent years have approached mainly through the lyric work by N. Scott Momaday, "The Way to Rainy Mountain." Read that work closely and you see that it draws heavily on "Calendar History of the Kiowa Indians," by James Mooney, which in turn drew on the traditional stories and calendars of the Kiowa themselves. Indian history on the plains often circles back on itself.

Kiowa stories of the plains begin on the upper Yellowstone, in present Montana. The stories recount, and Mooney maps, the evolutions and migrations by which the Coming Out People moved south to hunt and live on the central plains, then submit to (physical) confinement on a reservation in southwestern Oklahoma.

That is one meaning of the phrase, "the way to Rainy Mountain." Rainy Mountain is a modest knoll, but an important landmark, on the res.

The other main approach has to do with one’s own, personal identity. Momaday, a mixed-blood (like most all of us on the plains), chose the Kiowa side of his family as his identity. He reconstructed it using written works, oral accounts from his family, his own recollections, and encounters with places–"the remembered earth," in his famous phrase.

I commend his method to any plainsperson who feels the need for situation in time and place. Because we all live in a world of change, only some of which we can control, most of which we have to adapt to.

In the center of this Kiowa burial ground is the grave of Lone Wolf. It is a pedestal of granite with legend on three of the four faces:

• "Lone Wolf Chief of the Kiowas 1843-1923 Brought His People to Christianity and Civilization" 
• "Appointed Chief in 1863 – United States Scout in 1883 – Deacon of Elk Creek Baptist Church" 
• "Invited to the White House by the President in 1922 for the Last Time"

Atop the pedestal is a white cherub, the picture of innocence. Someone deemed that symbol appropriate, inasmuch as Lone Wolf converted to Christianity on the reservation and counseled accommodation to the white order of things. Or perhaps someone just appreciated the humor of it. Lone Wolf ran the buffalo, too, and led deadly war parties, and practiced blood revenge. Perhaps this angelic irony is his last revenge.

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Source: Tom Isern, (701) 799-2941, tom@plainsfolk.com 
Editor: Gary Moran, (701) 231-7865, gmoran@ndsuext.nodak.edu 

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